New Ways to see the World

I stumbled upon this interesting series of World maps at this site while reading some blogs.

The population map which shows each country extended according to their Population size is very interesting.
(Surprised to see the size of India , Canada and Australia!!).


http://www.odt.org/Index.htm

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Middleware matters!!

Couple of weeks before i was desperate to jump  into the Oracle Java  enterprise programming.
The result of which i was fiddling with my 1 GB RAM DELL laptop to have a complete Oracle 10G infrastructure and App server running.

For folks who have such bizarre desires here is an interesting article on Oracle 10G App server topography by Mr. John Garmany.


http://www.dba-oracle.com/art_dbazine_oracle_server_topography.htm

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Oracle's HTML DB technology making its inroads

Oracle is pushing its HTML DB technology for faster and easier way of building data driven web sites strongly and it has
built its Metalink site (The ulitmate Oracle knowledge and support website) newly using HTML DB.
The famous Oracle Asktom website is also running using HTML DB technology.

It would be interesting to wait and see how Oracle would market its use and applications.

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Optimization Can be Funny at Times!!

Sometimes people spend hours of effort on optimizing things which they might be running(if at all) only once and the actual process itself may take possibly less time than the effort spent. Funny  ..Is'nt it?
That's why Cost Benefit Analysis and predicting your benefits is an important measure for Oracle Performance Consulting projects.
This is well brought out by Cary Milsap and Jeff holt's book on "Optimizing Oracle Performance".
Earlier i had promised an article on Hotsos Profiler and why  it is given great importance in scientific approaches to Oracle Performance Consulting projects.
Unfortunately i had been working on many other things including working on my own 10046 Resource Profiler in Perl similar to Hotsos.
I would definitely highlight the salient features and concepts behind the Hotsos and Sparky Data collection tool at Hotsos by Cary Milsap et al.
Anyone interested in knowing about how Oracle RDBMS kernel mesaures itself in terms of CPU usage timing and Wait Event Statistics should read the above book by Cary Milsap along with Richmond Shee's book on Oracle Wait Event Tuning.

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The Art of Writing Good SQL -- By David Aldridge

This is a good article by Mr. David Aldridge and the original source is here. http://oraclesponge.blogspot.com).
My sincere apologies for not getting the author's name right and i was so careless and lazy that i pasted the entire article here without the orginal source link.

The article was really a comprehensive one and pls do read it at the above link.

Anways here is what the aricle outlines.

-- Excerpts from the above orginal source...
"
Writing Good SQL

I think that there are at least five elements to consider. In no particular order:

• Understanding what you are trying to do
• Knowledge of SQL syntax
• Appreciation of the data and the structure
• Optimization
• Measurement of performance

SourceID:NT0000368E

"

Oracle Federated Search

Here is a new Search link which gives a Federated Search for most of Oracle products and releases which include the following :

• Oracle Database 8i, 9i Release 2, 10g Release 1, 10g Release 2, Express Edition
• Oracle Application Server 9i Release 2, 10g Release 1, 10g Release 2
• Oracle Collaboration Suite 9i Release 2, 10g Release 1

http://otn.oracle.com/pls/db102/db102.federated_search

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Evolution of Oracle App.Server

Pls see this link for interesting information on Oracle App.Server and how it is evolving along with the DB server.
http://www.rittman.net/archives/000745.html

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Famous Scottish Castle 

Free Download : Oracle Jdeveloper with ADF

EASY WEB APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT USING ADF IN JDEVELOPER 10G

You can download free JDeveloper with ADF(For Windows) from,
http://download.oracle.com/otn/java/jdeveloper/10121/jdev1012.zip
(Around 200MB only )

Note : With ADF(Application Development Framework) in Oracle JDeveloper 10G you can rapidly develop J2EE applications using the
MVC (Model 2 with Struts controller) scalable architecture. ADF Data model and binding helps the J2EE developer with faster development
using the in built ADF runtime components. Just focus on Business services model , draw the business model dragging the enitity beans components.

You can develop a full HTML/web application in just 8 easy wizard driven steps. In addition if you have addtional knowledge on J2EE design you can deploy the components as web services or ADF UIX clients or whatever J2EE component you wish at each level.

For more info on this,
You can Download good presentations from experts at TUSC
http://team.tusc.com/pls/inet/inet_Download_Info_pkg.Get_Info?in_item=doc2004-jdeveloper_web_dev.zip
and http://team.tusc.com/pls/inet/inet_Download_Info_pkg.Get_Info?in_item=laoug2003-quick_web.zip

Oracle Performance Tuning-Never Dare to enter this sea without sufficient experience

As Steve(DatabaseJournal) points out Oracle Performance Tuning can be like drowning into a pool ..It can be a big confusion of sorts for those who involve in it for the first time without prior experience and sufficient knowledge/skills in this area.

A typical newbie would try to keep his/her hands on everything which may suggest need tuning without a fixed direction.

Tuning Oracle is a profession where your knowlege of how Oracle works would be under real test and expereince counts a lot.

You need to hit the right balance on looking at hit ratios(checklist based tuning) as well as focussing with extended sql trace (Wait interface tuning) and most imortantly on how your business management see this. The more they give importance to the tuning exercise the more would be your efforts..

If just making things work at some acceptable level is what you need, don't waste extra time on it..(personal lessons learnt)

 

Would come up with an interesting article on Extended SQL tracing(10046 event) and hotsos resource profiler(Why Cary Milsap charges you heavily for this..)

 

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Flashback Feature in Oracle 10G

Pls see this link

http://www.geocities.com/juancarlosreyesp/OracleAskTom.pdf

(Oracle 10G Flashback feature..thanks to Thomas Kyte)

On Oracle10G Model Clause--Powerful Spreadsheet like Calculations inside database

ORACLE 10G SQL Enhancement Model Clause
Having gone through the feature summary and an example from AskTom Website , it looks to me that
Oracle is trying to eliminate the need for spreadsheet programs which are used to do some inter-row calculations on the results fetched from the database. Looks impressive along with the analytic functions which Oracle has introduced on the SQL arena: For those who want to read the feature summary here is the link for the pdf(Thanks to Thomas Kyte) http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/bi/pdf/10gr1_twp_bi_dw_sqlmodel.pdf

In Scottland with some of my friends  

Oracle Application Schema Checklist and Database Checklist

This is a very good checklist from Pete Finnigan(Oracle guru on Security aspects)
http://www.sans.org/score/checklists/Oracle_Database_Checklist.pdf

Pls also see this:
(A useful checklist on Application schema before you put it in live--)

Follow this checklist to make sure your application schemas are ready to be put into production:

1. Perform physical configuration:

2. Does each application have its own schema?

3. Does each schema have its own set of table and index tablespaces?

4. Are tables and their corresponding indexes in separate tablespaces?

5. Check on performance issues:

6. If you are implementing referential integrity, are all core foreign keys indexed?

7. Are there tables without indexes?

8. Are there tables with too many indexes?

9. Are there tables with similar indexes?

10. Are the schema objects regularly analyzed?

11. Check on security issues:

12. Are all object grants performed through roles? (While doing this is not strictly necessary, it does make administration much easier.)

13. If your applications allow for it, are all updating capabilities granted through nondefault roles?

14. Check on miscellaneous issues:

15. Are naming conventions in place for all database objects? (While using consistent naming conventions is not strictly necessary, it does make administration much easier.)

16. Is the value of the PCTINCREASE parameter for each tablespace greater than 0? This will ensure the automatic coalescing of free space. If you do not want your extent sizes to change, you'll want to ensure that PCTINCREASE is set to 0.

I'll be bringing some useful articles on SQL tracing in my next post.

Apply your Logical reasoning and Intution

"Many times it's pure logical reasoning and Intution that saves time and solves problems that appear to be complex at the outset."
--Message of the Day

Mike Ault's Blog

Mike Ault's Blog
I like the post "Things to take on a tropical assignment"

Even those who are native to tropical regions sometimes suffer severly from allergy and sinus..

Mike is very true....

At work in Client's place 

Professional Oracle tuning with Statspack

This piece of information is for my friends and others who are keen and interested in knowing about me and my current work in Oracle. Also as a guide/starting point for some of them who mailed me recently as to what is this tuning Oracle all about :
Here are my comprehensive points/tips on that :(Don't forget to see my favourite links down below on this page...) ...

1. If you need installation information/usage info,you can read the Oracle supplied spdoc.txt which you can find in your ORACLE_HOME/rdbms/admin folder of your ORACLE home installation in your oracle DB server.All the information on how Statspack works,installation,usage,customizing it to collect stats automatically,maintenance of historic statspack data are neatly documented here in spdoc.txt.
Pls give it a reading ..it's worth spending some time here.Also if you have basic understanding of how Oracle processes sql and aware of V$ views in Oracle,then you can get some good info from other Oracle supplied sql scripts like sprepsql.sql which you use in getting sql reports . You can actually see how the ratios appearing in statspack are getting computed here.

2. In terms of interpreting it for analyzing performance problems this is really a huge area , i should say..But fortunately there are many good websites which give us good starting guide/info on this.

3. http://www.oraperf.com is a very good website which would give you good overall picture of performance issues in your DB.You can actually upload your statspack report for your oracle version and get a free advice report on performance related issues.I suggest you start with this free website which bases its interpretation on Oracle Wait Interface rather than the conventional hit ratios analysis.There are two schools in Oracle performance tuning..One which focuses on hit ratios and proactive tuning tech..and the other very popular one focuses on Oracle Wait interface analysis(often called reactive tuning and well suited for Systems which are already in live).
(Don't miss the paper by Anjo on Wait Interface tuning and also his blog...from the site)


4. These days i like reading Burleson's books a lot and found new interests in his articles too.
In particular i use the book Oracle 9i High Performance Tuning With Statspack by well known Oracle guru Don.Burleson. This book is really worth going buying it and gives you a complete picture of interpreting Statspack reports.This is a very written book which gives you scripts to start off with,Apart from Oracle supplied tables under PERFSTAT schema for Statspack,Burleson has developed some other small tools which will aid you in Disk,CPU and memory tuning of your Oracle DB server . Tuning your Oracle DB server in terms of CPU,Memory and Storage system is one that is not covered in statspack reports and this book would be ideal for tuning Unix based Oracle servers. Object growth analysis and Statspack Trend analysis are also covered in this book.
Pls read this http://www.osborne.com/products/0072133783/0072133783_ch15.pdf
(Trend Analysis using Statspack data) This is actually from the above book by Burleson and is very simple to understand.

5.There are a whole lot of tools available for interpreting statspack reports which aid in tuning effectively. If you can afford to buy one you can go for the one by http://dba-oracle.com/oracle_news/2005_1_11_statspack_viewer_software.htm. If you are very serious about performance tuning and your business management takes it seriously, much depends on your analysis etc..then you can go for it. Otherwise you can do without it. Afterall tuning Oracle applications depends much on KYD factor(Knowing Your data) and application sqls. 90% of tuning issues would be related to Application sqls and design issues . Only the remaining 10% would depend on Oracle instance tuning and DB server tuning(CPU,memory and Disk).

6. This tip is particularly relevant to one of my friend who mailed me the other day asking about how to go about reading Statspack reports for benchmarking and analyzing performance problems.
Thanks to my friend ..i am writing these tips becos of him and made me share a few things with others on Oracle tuning issues.

Since you say that your system is already in live and that you are planning to implement a new program you should focus on reactive tuning rather than the traditional top-down approach to tuning. Just get a good idea of how your existing system behaves and have the SLAs before you (say, this xxx report needs to finish in yyy seconds etc). After you implement your new program if any of the SLAs get disturbed you can start tuning by focusing on them. This way your tuning would be more meaningful and cost-effective pleasing your management at the same time. In case you have some tough DBA issues in the process you can raise them in this good DBA forum..(http://dba.ipbhost.com/index.php) In case you need any other info,pls feel free to contact me or in the above forum for DBAs

Hope this helps and Good luck to your future efforts ..

For all those who read this article,pls rate it and post your relevant comments and share things you know.